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This weekly blog is to explore the larger issues around Digital Health, data security, data privacy, AI / ML and related matters.
I will also try to highlight ADHA Propaganda when I come upon it.
Just so we keep count, the latest Notes from the ADHA Board are dated 6 December, 2018! Secrecy unconstrained! This is really the behaviour of a federal public agency gone rogue – and it just goes on! When you read this it will be well over 12 months of radio silence. I wonder will things improve with the CEO and COO gone?
Note: Appearance here is not to suggest I see any credibility or value in what follows. I will leave it to the reader to decide what is worthwhile and what is not! The point is to let people know what is being said / published that I have come upon.
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Government coy on metadata encryption exemption for telcos
Telcos face ‘ridicule’, security risks over data retention details, Home Affairs says
Editor, Computerworld | 5 December 2019 14:24 AEDT
Revealing which telecommunications providers have been granted exemptions from a requirement to encrypt information covered by the data retention scheme could expose them to security risks or public ridicule, according to officials at the Department of Home Affairs.
The legislation implementing Australia’s data retention regime requires that service providers “must protect the confidentiality of information” retained to comply with Section 187A of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act through “encrypting the information” and “protecting the information from unauthorised interference or unauthorised access”.
However, the Communications Access Co-ordinator (CAC) — a function that currently sits within Home Affairs – is empowered to sign off on Data Retention Implementation Plans (DRIPs) that exempt a service provider from the obligations of Section 187BA (which outlines the encryption requirement).
Earlier this year Optus revealed that it would have struggled to comply with its data retention obligations if it hadn’t
been granted an exemption from the metadata encryption requirement. Optus revealed in a submission to a review of the data retention scheme by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) that it had “applied for and received limited exemptions from the encryption obligation”.
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What is digital health and why does it matter?
By David Rowlands
Digital Health Workforce Academy and the Health Informatics Society of Australia
Health organisations all over the world are developing and implementing digital health strategies, and companies from start-ups to long-established players are spruiking digital health. But are we all talking about the same thing? This paper presents the view that digital health is in fact something quite new – an evolutionary step in the 70-year journey of the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in the health sector, but a step that transcends technology.
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Albanese warns 'complacent' Facebook putting democratic values at risk
December 7, 2019 — 12.00am
Labor leader Anthony Albanese will warn a "complacent" Facebook is putting Australia's democratic values at risk, while urging all sides of politics to "step back" from social media and return to "rational discussion".
The Opposition Leader will on Saturday offer his support to the Your Right To Know campaign, promising a bipartisan approach if the Morrison government wants to change the law to protect press freedom.
While urging his political opponents to respect the views of the country's top scientists and experts on subjects like climate change, Mr Albanese will also call on progressive movements to better understand the viewpoints of those who feel insecure about change.
In his third "vision statement" since taking federal Labor's top job after its shock election loss, Mr Albanese will call for a "renewal of Australia's democracy", which he claims is under attack from secret government processes, social media and a decline in the standard of public discourse.
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Insurer NIB wants access to members’ genetic information
· 8:04PM December 6, 2019
Health insurer NIB wants to use genetic information and My Health Record data to calculate the risk profiles of its members, in a major push towards personalised preventive medicine.
The listed insurer has created a data science and health services company in partnership with US provider Cigna Corporation, with plans to use de-identified big data to calculate individual health risks. NIB chief executive Mark Fitzgibbon raised the ire of doctors by foreshadowing an application by the new company to access government-held electronic health records.
“Potentially this body as a registered healthcare provider, with our members’ permission, could access My Health Record,” he said. “It will be a healthcare provider and it will be eligible to apply to access that data.”
But the body in charge of My Health Record, the Australian Digital Health Agency, reiterated that My Health Record data “cannot be privatised or used for commercial purposes”. Insurers are barred from applying to access My Health Record data under legislation.
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Media release - Improving digital health literacy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders people
6 December 2019: The Australian Digital Health Agency met with representatives from state and territory Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health services on 4 December to support improvements in digital health literacy. ADHA Propaganda
The national partnership of Affiliates meets quarterly to progress strategic digital health priorities that contribute to Closing The Gap.
This meeting was held in Tasmania and was hosted by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, and was attended by representatives from:
- Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC)
- Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO)
- Aboriginal Health Council of SA (AHCSA)
- Aboriginal Health Council of WA (AHCWA)
- Queensland Aboriginal and Islander Health Council (QAIHC)
- Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance NT (AMSANT)
- Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health and Community Services (WNAHCS)
- Aboriginal Health and Medical Research Council of NSW (AH&MRC)
- National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO)
Each jurisdiction showcased the progress of their local initiatives and received an update on the Agency’s 2020 community engagement work.
Heather Sculthorpe, CEO of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, said “It’s vital that Aboriginal health services are involved in the work of the Digital Health Agency as our holistic approach to the health of our people ensures those who will benefit most from engaging with digital health have the information to enable them to do so.”
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NIB's start-up a step towards better prevention
NIB's new health services start-up aims to keep consumers out of hospital. But it will attract critics.
Dec 6, 2019 — 3.06pm
NIB Group’s new health services start-up is an example of how the private health insurance industry isn’t waiting for governments to help reduce the number of consumers needing expensive hospital treatment.
Chief executive Mark Fitzgibbon will pump $10 million into the new business, which will be matched by NIB’s joint venture partner, the US health services group Cigna.
NIB will then become a customer of the new start-up, which aims to analyse and interpret data to identify patients with certain risks and then suggest and deliver early-intervention programs of care. Over time, it believes other smaller insurers and government agencies might become customers too.
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Labor's plan to fix Australia's encryption laws doesn't go far enough
The new Bill to require judicial oversight and a clarification of definitions is a great start, Labor says, but the Assistance and Access regime needs reining in much more tightly.
On Tuesday the Labor Party announced it would attempt to fix Australia's controversial encryption laws. Yes, the laws that Labor itself voted for in December 2018, enabling the government to get them over the line.
The two main features of the Bill are inserting judges into the approval process, and trying to clarify what law enforcement and intelligence agencies can and can't demand from communications providers.
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Online age verification will have to involve biometrics: Former eSafety chief
Similar to eye balling a person suspected of being underaged in a liquor store, Alastair MacGibbon has said any online age verification system would need to involve biometric proof, such as a video.
"I think biometrics -- with all of the problems associated with biometrics, and they are not a silver bullet -- is the only way you could really have an online system," MacGibbon said.
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Millions sunk on all-in-one systems: Why it's time to rethink e-health
Dr Merkel (PhD) is a lecturer in Software Engineering at Monash University.
6th December 2019
A directive ordering Queensland Health staff to avoid upgrades to the state’s hospital electronic medical records system during parliamentary sitting weeks was recently reversed.
After the email containing the directive was leaked, the state’s health minister, Steven Miles, revoked the directive. He said the timing of upgrades should be based on “what’s best for clinical care”.
Queensland’s integrated electronic medical records system (ieMR) is designed to provide information about patients in the state’s health system. The ieMR was built by Cerner, a global provider of electronic medical records software. Like any IT project of this scale, it’s extensively customised for Queensland Health and individual hospitals.
The directive to refrain from ieMR upgrades during sitting weeks seems to be connected to 38 system outages earlier this year. Most of these happened following upgrades performed by Cerner.
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Right now we’re just milk cows for data farmers
· 12:00AM December 6, 2019
One month ago the NSW government launched the digital driver’s licence. In its first month, the adoption has been significant: 900,000 people have downloaded the Service NSW app and received their digital licence, and they are using it with the police, pubs and clubs across the state. Even better, more than 96 per cent of people who’ve provided feedback have given us the thumbs up.
The digital driver’s licence lays the groundwork for an ambitious agenda of digital reform, one that further enhances the customer experience and service delivery options.
The key to success in all things digital is trust. There are four pillars to the trust temple: privacy, security, transparency and ethics.
Data is everywhere and with wearable technology it is increasingly on everybody: where we go, what we had to eat, when we last did exercise, what our heart rate is, how we slept. We are all producing data at unprecedented rates. While collection of this personal data generally benefits us, it does prompt an important question: in an age where we are becoming data cows, who owns the milk?
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Entering the digital era
With national e-prescribing on the horizon, is pharmacy ready for the next big wave of technological change?
Sydney pharmacy proprietor Nick Logan met a pharmacist from Sweden at a social event a few years ago, and what she said made him think about the need to push forward with e-prescribing in Australia.
“She said that she graduated in 2003, and she’d never seen a paper prescription before she came to Australia,” says Logan.
“She said [in Sweden] effectively they use what’s their Medicare card, and they just present it at any pharmacy and it dispenses one box of their medicine out of the ‘cloud’—out of however many boxes the doctor prescribed into the cloud.”
It’s about time for Australia to introduce similar measures of digitisation across the healthcare industry, says Logan, who adds that pharmacists are frequently underestimated when it comes to their ability to embrace it.
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Nearly a third of Advance Care Directives are invalid
A nationwide study from Advance Care Planning Australia (ACPA), a national program empowering consumers to prepare for important healthcare decisions in the future, has found nearly a third of Advance Care Directives (ACDs) audited in residential aged care facilities around the country were invalid.
Posted 5 December, 2019
by Liz Alderslade
Without an Advance Care Directive, Advance Care Planning Australia says they will always be confusion for aged care staff, families and health care providers. [Source: Shutterstock]
The research uncovered 30 percent of ACDs of residents in nursing homes had been completed by another person, such as a family member, on behalf of a person that was no longer competent.
Of those documents, around 68 percent had instructions for withholding life-sustaining treatment, like tube feeding or intravenous antibiotics.
Program Director of Advance Care Planning Australia, Linda Nolte, explains that advance care planning is incredibly important for older Australians to continue living their life on their own terms as they grow older.
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PM prepares to punish digital services underperformance
As five agency chiefs removed.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has fired up the public service delivery DeLorean and hit the flux capacitor for a journey back in bureaucratic time to make technology a standardised, Volkswagen-style policy enabler.
And like electric windows or colour television, he's seeking to draw a line under the idea that digital is some ‘hot new thing’. It's stock.
There will be plenty of IT and digital industry handwringing and public wailing about the purge of Turnbullesque buzzwords like ‘innovation’ and ‘digital’ in the
new clutch of mega portfolios, but that’s not the main game at a machinery of government level.
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Communications dept abolished in APS restructure
As Services Australia shifts from department to agency.
The Department of Communications and the Arts will merge with the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Cities and Regional Development in February 2020 to create a new super-department.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison revealed the changes on Thursday ahead of the release of David Thodey's long-awaited root-and-branch review of the Australian Public Service next week, a move that took many by surprise.
The new department, named the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications, will be one of four new departments to be established on 1 February 2020.
It is the first change to the composition of the current Communications department since it was created in a September 2015 restructure brought by former PM Malcolm Turnbull, and effectively pushes communications policy down further down the government’s pecking order.
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Paperless scripts are coming as GPs embrace the cloud
· 12:00AM December 5, 2019
Prepare for change when you visit the doctor next year. The practice of being issued a physical medicine script as you leave the surgery is being wound back. Instead, scripts are going paperless and it will change the way that medicines are accessed across Australia.
Your doctor will create a digital script and upload it to the cloud. Your pharmacist will download your prescription and dispense it.
This has lots of advantages. With the new system, the age-old problem of losing your paper script will vanish. There’s the opportunity for third-party app developers to help you manage your medicines on your phone. Where appropriate you can obtain a script from your doctor over the internet, and get it filled and delivered without leaving home.
It’s not compulsory. If this is all too much, you can stick with paper scripts. But before you get too nostalgic for paper scripts, think back to when doctors scratched them down with poor handwriting — in Latin — leaving us at risk of getting the wrong drug or dose.
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Thursday, 05 December 2019 02:24
Data sharing privacy in focus with ACS
Australia should develop a systemised and standardised safe data sharing regime with independent verification demonstrating the benefit to the community, according to a new report on data privacy by the Australian Computer Society (ACS).
Launching the report -
Privacy Preserving Data Sharing Frameworks - on Wednesday, the
ACS outlined a basis for balancing the need for governments and business to share information while maintaining citizens’ privacy.
Delivered by a team led by NSW Chief Scientist and ACS Vice President, Dr Ian Oppermann, the paper stated “deidentifying data is a complex issue but one that needs to be addressed by industry and government”.
“Answering the question of ‘will linking deidentified datasets actually lead to being able to identify someone?’ turns out to be a very subtle and complex challenge,” Dr Oppermann said.
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Patient advocacy groups team up to change federal health policy
December 5, 2019 — 12.01am
A super-alliance of support groups for patients with chronic diseases has been formed to lobby the federal government to do more for patients living with ongoing conditions.
The Australian Patient Advocacy Alliance (APAA) has been created with the support of 22 groups, including MS Australia, Ovarian Cancer Australia, and the Leukaemia Foundation.
Deidre Mackechnie, the chief executive of MS Australia and the new co-chair of APAA, said the original organisations would continue to do their work, but they had joined forces to advocate for things that affected all the people they represented.
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Wednesday, 04 December 2019 11:13
Australia will lose more than 630,000 jobs in next decade: study
A total of more than 630,000 jobs will be displaced in Australia during the next 10 years, global networking firm Cisco claims in a study carried out by Oxford Economics.
The 54-page report said while technological change could enable growth of productivity, significant parts of the workforce could be left behind if they did not acquire the skills needed.
The "displacement effect" equates to about 7.3% of the existing workforce. This reduction does not mean that economic output will suffer, the study pointed out.
Healthcare was nominated as the biggest net job creator over the next decade, with 80,000 new jobs being added. Tourism and retail are also expected to grow, by 22,000 and 20,000 workers, respectively.
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The Promise Of AI
Richard (Rick) Mills
Ahead of the Herd
As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.
The Promise of AI
In ‘The Terminator' series of action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, a cybernetic organism (cyborg) is programmed from the future to go back in time and kill the mother of the scientist who leads the fight against Skynet, an artificial intelligence system that will cause a nuclear holocaust.
Terrifying and at times comical ("I'll be back", "Make my day") The Terminator cyborg was among the first presentations of artificial intelligence (AI) to a global audience. ("C3PO" and "R2D2" of Star Wars fame and "Data" from Star Trek also qualify) The robotic assassin also depicted an extreme scenario of what could happen when "machine learning", a vital element of AI, runs amok – ie. when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence to the point when the machines take over and try to eliminate the humans who created them.
While numerous facets of AI have been developed over the past couple of decades, all with positive outcomes, the fear of AI being programmed to do something devastating to the human race, of computers "going rogue", continues to persist.
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My Health Record - participation obligations for private, public and day stay hospitals
Details
Hosted by : Australian Digital Health Agency ADHA Propaganda
Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - 19:00 to 20:00
Online Australia
This webinar will focus on My Health Record provider obligations for private hospitals and their staff, with a particular focus on:
- Connection and Use
- Legislation
- Privacy and Consent
- Security and Access
- Account management
- Policies
- Training register
- Breach notifications
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The government is hyping digitalised services, but not addressing a history of e-government fails
December 3, 2019 1.37pm AEDT
In politics, when you have little to show for your achievements, you can release a “roadmap” for what will supposedly be achieved in the future.
You can look on the bright side. Use phrases such as “
ontology of capabilities”, and disregard a number of crashes, traffic jams, protests and policy detours.
When the strategy was launched last year, it was
described as offering a “clear direction” for the government’s digital efforts over the next seven years. It would ensure Australia’s place as one of the “top three digital governments” by 2025.
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‘Forget killer robots, AI a force for good’
· 4:35PM December 2, 2019
Artificial intelligence can play a crucial role for social good and tackling issues such as domestic violence and mental health, according to British expert Kriti Sharma.
Ms Sharma advises global businesses and is a member of the UK government’s AI Council which formed earlier this year to promote the adoption and ethical use of technology.
The federal government also this month released a new set of AI ethics principles for businesses, with NAB, Commonwealth Bank, Telstra, Microsoft and Flamingo AI all taking part in a trial.
Speaking to The Australian, Ms Sharma pointed to a program in South Africa involving an AI-based tool for survivors of domestic abuse as an example of how AI can power social good. She said one in three women in South Africa faced such abuse, but less than 1 per cent of cases were reported due to stigma.
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How to regulate the coming age of AI
Simon Bush
· 3:55PM December 2, 2019
The Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) recently hosted a delegation of Australian government and business technology executives visiting the great technology companies in Seattle, San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.
Hearing directly from global CEOs and tech leaders on their challenges and where they are driving their businesses demonstrated clear common themes from which we must learn.
When Silicon Valley doubles down and invests the sort of money it is investing, it will forever change workplaces and society. It’s imperative we listen.
The biggest investments from both big tech and the plethora of start-ups in the next stage of the digital disruption are around artificial intelligence (AI). The focus was on AI enhancing decision-making for humans, not replacing them. It’s about freeing up manual, low-value, repetitive work resources or gaining insight and recommendation to solve business problems, but not replace the human in the chain.
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'Risk of real consumer harm': ACCC sends warning on loyalty schemes
December 3, 2019 — 11.55am
The consumer watchdog says that major retailers and airlines could use data collected through customer loyalty schemes to discriminate against customers with inflated prices, while also hurting competition by "locking in" customers with loyalty points.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's final report into loyalty programs, released on Tuesday, also found that members in some schemes were having their points cancelled without fair warning, and that consumers often have little insight or control over how their personal data is collected or shared with third parties.
“Many consumers are increasingly concerned about receiving targeted advertising, in some cases from companies that they have never dealt with before,” said ACCC chair Rod Sims.
“There is also an emerging risk of real consumer harm if individual consumers were to be charged inflated prices based on profiling derived from their data."
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'Government broke their promise': Labor seeks to amend encryption legislation
December 3, 2019 — 12.23pm
Labor will seek to force the government to change controversial encryption-piercing legislation, introducing amendments to the Senate in line with the findings of a bipartisan parliamentary committee.
The laws, which compel a company to provide assistance or introduce technical changes to its platforms to access user data, has been heavily criticised by the tech sector. The companies argue the legislation undermines the security of their products and erodes user trust.
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Westpac mess highlights broader tech struggle
Financial cops and financial services companies must work closely together as it has never been easier to use the internet and cryptocurrencies to send money anonymously.
Dec 3, 2019 — 12.00am
The repercussions of Westpac's failure to plug holes in the reporting of questionable overseas payments are now obvious to boards and executives around the country.
Clearly Westpac as an organisation erred unacceptably and spectacularly by repeatedly failing to revisit an issue with anti-money laundering compliance that could have been fixed, but the mess has also shone a light on the broader battle to keep control of the flow of money around the world.
It has never been harder for authorities to know who is sending money and to whom, or for them to be sure that they are even looking in the right places, as criminal transactions are like a needle in a haystack of an unfathomable number of legitimate payments made daily.
The Australian Financial Review reported on Saturday that authorities are
chasing their tails plugging gaps in tried and tested real world money laundering scams, but the problems become arguably even more difficult when the issue moves into the digital realm.
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December 2 2019 - 5:00AM
Creative thinking overcomes growing health burden
· Paul Lupo, St.Lukes Health
Big picture: We can't continue to rely just on the public purse or suffer increased premiums to fix our own health.
I recently had the pleasure of hearing world-renowned researcher and Launceston physiotherapist Ianthe Boden speak.
Her talk centred around a new frontier of healthcare that not only looks at getting a patient back on their feet and in good health sooner, but also alleviates the pressure on the public purse by reducing a patient's potential days in hospital.
In case you missed it, Ianthe's research looked at providing patients who have abdominal surgery with exercise rehabilitation programs as soon as they come out of surgery.
The research found that those who were active in their care and were educated on why they should receive physiotherapy immediately after surgery were 50 per cent less likely to develop chest infections or potentially pneumonia and were in hospital for three days less than those who opted not to participate in an active recovery.
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Going for a new job? Here's how to clean up your digital footprint
Dec 2, 2019 — 4.30pm
Whether preparing for a job interview or to get on board of a company about to go public, take it as given that the person on the other side of the desk will Google you.
Multiple studies show that more than 75 per cent of employers actively research candidates online, and more than 70 per cent have decided not to hire a candidate based on what they've found.
Whether your online image is only mildly salacious or there's something more problematic out there, Removify co-founder Andrew Whitford says there are ways to cleanse your digital footprint.
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APRA sends a serious message on cyber-security - and now with added regulatory bite
APRA says its regulated entities must act on the basis that their information security defences will be compromised by a cyber-adversary, and must be ready to repel the attack, re-secure the network and rectify any damage – but a recent survey reveals 70% have gaps.
These days it’s no longer a question of whether your company will be hacked – sooner or later, every corporation large or small will suffer some form of outside penetration. In many cases it wasn’t about theft of money but about theft of the private and sensitive data of thousands of people which are taken and aggregated on various dark web lists for sale and ultimately used for criminal purposes.
Given the large amounts of sensitive data held by the entities it regulates, APRA created a new guideline to take the fight to another level.
The updated APRA Prudential Standard CPS 234 Management of Information and Information Technology, which came into effect in July, and the elevation of cyber resilience in its updated Corporate Plan to one of its top four strategic priorities, are the regulator’s signal that the days of the “tick box, set-and-forget approach to security” have ended. Super funds, deposit-taking institutions, general insurers as well as life and health insurers will now need to
actively prove the robustness of their systems and the efficacy of their cyber risk management both internally and outsourced.
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Comments more than welcome!
David.
